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3. Modernity: 48-72
I. A CLERK IN ORDERS
It was a great day, amid all their quiet days, for the people of
Deux-manoirs--one of the later days of August. The event, which
would mark it always in the life of one of them, called into play all
that was most expressive in that well-defined family character: it
was at once the recognition of what they valued most in past years,
and an assertion of will, or hope, for the [5] future, accordant
thereto. Far away in Paris the young King Charles the Ninth, in his
fourteenth year, had been just declared of age. Here, in the church
of Saint Hubert, church of their parish, and of their immemorial
patronage, though it lay at a considerable distance from their abode,
the chiefs of the house of Latour, attended by many of its dependents
and less important members, were standing ready, around the last hope
of their old age--the grandparents, their aged brothers and sisters,
certain aged ecclesiastics of their kindred, wont to be called to the
family councils.
They had set out on foot, after a votive mass said early in the old
chapel of the manor, to assist at the ceremony of the day.
Distinguishable from afar by unusual height in proportion to its
breadth within, the church of Saint Hubert had an atmosphere, a
daylight, to itself. Its stained glass, work of the same hands that
had wrought for the cathedral of Chartres, admitted only an almost
angry ray of purple or crimson, here or there, across the dark, roomy
spaces. The heart, the heart of youth at least, sank, as one
entered, stepping warily out of the sunshine over the sepulchral
stones which formed the entire pavement of the church, a great
blazonry of family history from age to age for indefatigable eyes.
An abundance of almost life-sized sculpture clung to the pillars,
lurked in the angles, seemed, with those symbolical gestures, and
mystic faces [6] ready to speak their parts, to be almost in motion
through the gloom. Many years after, Gaston de Latour, an enemy of
all Gothic darkness or heaviness, returning to his home full of a
later taste, changed all that. A thicket of airy spires rose above
the sanctuary; the blind triforium broke into one continuous window;
the heavy masses of stone were pared down with wonderful dexterity of
hand, till not a hand's-breadth remained uncovered by delicate
tracery, as from the fair white roof, touched sparingly with gold,
down to the subterranean chapel of Saint Taurin, where the peasants
of La Beauce came to pray for rain, not a space was left unsearched
by cheerful daylight, refined, but hardly dimmed at all, by painted
glass mimicking the clearness of the open sky. In the sombre old
church all was in stately order now: the dusky, jewelled reliquaries,
the ancient devotional ornaments from the manor--much-prized family
possessions, sufficient to furnish the whole array of a great
ecclesiastical function like this--the lights burning, flowers
everywhere, gathered amid the last handfuls of the harvest by the
peasant-women, who came to present their children for the happy
chance of an episcopal blessing.
And the almost exclusively aged people, in all their old personal
adornments, which now so rarely saw the light, forming the central
group, expectant around the young seigneur they had conducted hither,
seemed of one piece with [7] those mystic figures, the old, armour-
clad monumental effigies, the carved and painted imageries which ran
round the outer circuit of the choir--a version of the biblical
history, for the reading of those who loitered on their way from
chapel to chapel. There was Joseph's dream, with the tall sheaves of
the elder brethren bowing to Joseph's sheaf, like these aged heads
around the youthful aspirant of to-day. There was Jacob going on his
mysterious way, met by, conversing with, wrestling with, the Angels
of God--rescuing the promise of his race from the "profane" Esau.
There was the mother of Samuel, and, in long white ephod, the much-
desired, early-consecrated child, who had inherited her religious
capacity; and David, with something of his extraordinary genius for
divine things written on his countenance; onward, to the sacred
persons of the Annunciation, with the golden lily in the silver cup,
only lately set in its place. With dress, expression, nay! the very
incidents themselves innocently adapted to the actual habits and
associations of the age which had produced them, these figures of the
old Jewish history seemed about to take their places, for the
imparting of a divine sanction, among the living actors of the day.
One and all spoke of ready concurrence with religious motions, a
ready apprehension of, and concurrence with, the provisions of a
certain divine scheme for the improvement of one's opportunities in
the world.
[8] Would that dark-haired, fair-skinned lad concur, in his turn, and
be always true to his present purpose--Gaston de Latour, standing
thus, almost the only youthful thing, amid the witness of these
imposing, meditative, masks and faces? Could his guardians have read
below the white propriety of the youth, duly arrayed for dedication,
with the lighted candle in his right hand and the surplice folded
over his left shoulder, he might sorely have disturbed their placid
but somewhat narrow ruminations, with the germs of what was strange
to or beyond them. Certain of those shrewd old ecclesiastics had in
fact detected that the devout lad, so visibly impressed, was not
altogether after their kind; that, together with many characteristics
obviously inherited, he possessed--had caught perhaps from some
ancestor unrepresented here--some other potencies of nature, which
might not always combine so accordantly as to-day with the mental
requisites of an occasion such as this. One of them, indeed, touched
notwithstanding by his manifest piety just then, shortly afterwards
recommended him a little prayer "for peace" from the Vespers of the
Roman Breviary--for the harmony of his heart with itself; advice
which, except for a very short period, he ever afterwards followed,
saying it every evening of his life.
Yet it was the lad's own election which had led him to this first
step in a career that might take him out of the world and end the
race of [9] Latour altogether. Approaching their fourscore years,
and realising almost suddenly the situation of the young Gaston, left
there alone, out of what had been a large, much-promising, resonant
household, they wished otherwise, but did not try to change his
early-pronounced preference for the ecclesiastical calling. When he
determined to seek the clericature, his proposal made a demand on all
their old-fashioned religious sentiment. But the fund was a deep
one, and their acquiescence in the result entire. He might indeed
use his privilege of "orders" only as the stepping-stone to material
advancement in a church which seemed to have gone over wholly to the
world, and of which at that time one half the benefices were
practically in the hands of laymen. But, actually, the event came to
be a dedication on their part, not unlike those old biblical ones--an
offering in old age of the single precious thing left them; the
grandchild, whose hair would presently fall under the very shears
which, a hundred years before, had turned an earlier, brilliant,
Gaston de Latour into a monk.
The rite with which the Roman Church "makes a clerk," aims certainly
at no low measure of difference from the coarser world around him, in
its supposed scholar: and in this case the [11] aspirant (the precise
claims of the situation being well considered) had no misgiving.
Discreetly, and with full attention, he answers Adsum! when his name
is called, and advances manfully; though he kneels meekly enough, and
remains, with his head bowed forward, at the knees of the seated
bishop who recites the appointed prayers, between the anthems and
responses of his Schola, or attendant singers--Might he be saved from
mental blindness! Might he put on the new man, even as his outward
guise was changed! Might he keep the religious habit for ever! who
had thus hastened to lay down the hair of his head for the divine
love. "The Lord is my inheritance" whispers Gaston distinctly, as
the locks fall, cut from the thickly-grown, black head, in five
places, "after the fashion of Christ's crown," the shears in the
episcopal hands sounding aloud, amid the silence of the curious
spectators. From the same hands, in due order, the fair surplice
ripples down over him. "This is the generation of them that seek
Him," the choir sings: "The Lord Himself is the portion of my
inheritance and my cup." It was the Church's eloquent way of bidding
unrestricted expansion to the youthful heart in its timely purpose to
seek the best, to abide among the things of the spirit.
The prospect from their cheerful, unenclosed road, like a white scarf
flung across the land, as [12] the party returned home in the late
August afternoon, was clear and dry and distant. The great barns at
the wayside had their doors thrown back, displaying the dark, cool
space within. The farmsteads seemed almost tenantless, the villagers
being still at work over the immense harvest-field. Crazy bells
startled them, striking out the hour from behind, over a deserted
churchyard. Still and tenantless also seemed the manor as they
approached, door and window lying open upon the court for the
coolness; or rather it was as if at their approach certain spectral
occupants started back out of the daylight--"Why depart, dear
ghosts?" was what the grandparents would have cried. They had more
in common with that immaterial world than with flesh and blood.
There was room for the existing household, enough and to spare, in
one of the two old houses. That other, the Ch�teau d'Amour, remained
for Gaston, at first as a delightful, half-known abode of wonders,
though with some childish fear; afterwards, as a delightful nursery
of refined or fantastic sentiment, as he recalled, in this chamber or
that, its old tenants and their doings, from the affectionate
brothers, onwards--above all, how in one room long ago Gabrielle de
Latour had died of joy.
The life of Gaston de Latour was almost to coincide with the duration
of the Religious Wars. The earliest public event of his memory was
that famous siege of Orleans from which the young Henri de Guise rode
away the head of his restless family, tormented now still further by
the reality or the pretence of filial duty, seeking vengeance on the
treacherous murder of his father. Following a long period of quiet
progress--the tranquil and tolerant years of the [16] Renaissance--
the religious war took possession of, and pushed to strangely
confused issues, a society somewhat distraught by an artificial
aesthetic culture; and filled with wild passions, wildly-dramatic
personalities, a scene already singularly attractive by its artistic
beauty. A heady religious fanaticism was worked by every prominent
egotist in turn, pondering on his chances, in the event of the
extinction of the house of Valois with the three sons of Catherine de
Medici, born unsound, and doomed by astrological prediction. The old
manors, which had exchanged their towers for summer-houses under the
softening influence of Renaissance fashions, found themselves once
more medievally insecure amid a vagrant warfare of foreign
mercenaries and armed peasants. It was a curiously refined people
who now took down the armour, hanging high on the wall for decoration
among newer things so little warlike.
It may be understood that there was a certain rudeness about the old
manor, left almost untouched from age to age, with a loyalty which
paid little or no heed to changes of fashion. The Ch�teau d'Amour,
indeed, as the work of a later age, refined somewhat upon the rough
feudal architecture; and the daintier taste had centred itself in
particular upon one apartment, a veritable woman's apartment, with an
effect in some degree anticipating the achievement of Gaston's own
century, in which the apparatus of daily life became so eloquent of
the moods of those to whom it ministered. It was the chamber of
Gabrielle de Latour, who had died of joy. Here certainly she had
watched, at these windows, during ten whole years, for the return of
her beloved husband from a disastrous battle in the East, till
against all expectation she beheld him crossing the court at last.
Immense privilege! Immense distinction! Again and again Gaston
tried to master the paradox, at times, in deep concentration of mind,
seemed [21] almost to touch the point of that wonderful moment.
The beauty of the world and its sorrow, solaced a little by religious
faith, itself so beautiful a thing; these were the chief impressions
with which he made his way outwards, at first only in longer rambles,
as physical strength increased, over his native plains, whereon, as
we have seen, the cruel warfare of that age had [25] aggravated at a
thousand points the everyday appeal of suffering humanity. The vast
level, stretching thirty miles from east to west, thirty from north
to south:--perhaps the reader may think little of its resources for
the seeker after natural beauty, or its capacity to develope the
imagination. A world, he may fancy, in which there could be no
shadows, at best not too cheerful colours. In truth, it was all
accent, so to speak. But then, surely, all the finer influences of
every language depend mostly on accent; and he has but to think of it
as Gaston actually lived in it to find a singularly companionable
soul there. Gaston, at least, needed but to go far enough across it
for those inward oppositions to cease, which already at times beset
him; to feel at one with himself again, under the influence of a
scene which had for him something of the character of the sea--its
changefulness, its infinity, its pathos in the toiling human life
that traversed it. Featureless, if you will, it was always under the
guidance of its ample sky. Scowling back sometimes moodily enough,
but almost never without a remnant of fine weather, about August it
was for the most part cloudless. And then truly, under its blue
dome, the great plain would as it were "laugh and sing," in a kind of
absoluteness of sympathy with the sun.
[26] Like a ship for ever a-sail in the distance, thought the child,
everywhere the great church of Chartres was visible, with the passing
light or shadow upon its grey, weather-beaten surfaces. The people
of La Beauce were proud, and would talk often of its rich store of
sacred furniture, the wonder-working relics of "Our Lady under the
Earth," and her sacred veil or shift, which kings and princes came to
visit, returning with a likeness thereof, replete in miraculous
virtue, for their own wearing. The busy fancy of Gaston, multiplying
this chance hearsay, had set the whole interior in array--a dim,
spacious, fragrant place, afloat with golden lights. Lit up over the
autumn fields at evening, the distant spires suggested the splendour
within, with so strong an imaginative effect, that he seemed scarcely
to know whether it was through the mental or bodily eye that he
beheld. When he came [27] thither at last, like many another well-
born youth, to join the episcopal household as a kind of half-
clerical page, he found (as happens in the actual testing of our
ideals) at once more and less than he had supposed; and his earlier
vision was a thing he could never precisely recover, or disentangle
from the supervening reality. What he saw, certainly, was greater
far in mere physical proportion, and incommensurable at first by
anything he knew--the volume of the wrought detail, the mass of the
component members, the bigness of the actual stones of the masonry,
contrary to the usual Gothic manner, and as if in reminiscence of
those old Druidic piles amid which the Virgin of Chartres had been
adored, long before the birth of Christ, by a mystic race, possessed
of some prophetic sense of the grace in store for her. Through
repeated dangers good-fortune has saved that unrivalled treasure of
stained glass; and then, as now, the word "awful," so often applied
to Gothic aisles, was for once really applicable. You enter, looking
perhaps for a few minutes' cool shelter from the summer noonday; and
the placid sunshine of La Beauce seems to have been transformed in a
moment into imperious, angry fire.
It was not in summer, however, that Gaston first set foot there; he
saw the beautiful city for the first time as if sheathed austerely in
repellent armour. In his most genial subsequent impressions of the
place there was always a lingering [28] trace of that famous frost
through which he made his way, wary of petrifying contact against
things without, to the great western portal, on Candlemas morning.
The sad, patient images by the doorways of the crowded church seemed
suffering now chiefly from the cold. It was almost like a funeral--
the penitential violet, the wandering taper-light, of this half-
lenten feast of Purification. His new companions, at the head and in
the rear of the long procession, forced every one, even the Lord
Bishop himself, to move apace, bustling along, cross-bearer and
acolyte, in their odd little copes, out of the bitter air, which made
the jolly life Gaston now entered on, around the great fire of their
hall in the episcopal palace, seem all the more winsome.
And it had another very remarkable difference from almost all Gothic
churches: there were no graves there. Its emptiness in this respect
is due to no revolutionary or Huguenot desecration. Once indeed,
about this very time, a popular military leader had been interred
with honour, within the precinct of the high altar itself. But not
long afterwards, said the reverend canons, resenting on the part of
their immaculate patroness this intrusion, the corpse itself, ill at
ease, had protested, lifting up its hands above [30] the surface of
the pavement, as if to beg interment elsewhere; and Gaston could
remember assisting, awakened suddenly one night, at the removal of
the remains to a more ordinary place of sepulture.
And yet that lavish display of jewellers' work on the altars, in the
chapels, the sacristies, of Our Lady's Church, was but a framing for
little else than dead people's bones. To Gaston, a piteous soul,
with a touch also of that grim humour which, as we know, holds of
pity, relic-worship came naturally. At Deux-manoirs too there had
been relics, including certain broken children's toys and some rude
childish drawings, taken forth now and then with almost religious
veneration, with trembling hands and renewal of old grief, to his
wondering awe at the greatness of men's sorrows. Yes! the pavement
under one's feet had once been, might become again for him, molten
lava. The look, the manner, of those who exposed these things, had
been a revelation. The abundant relics of the church of Chartres
were for the most part perished remnants of the poor human body
itself; but, appertaining to persons long ago and of a far-off,
immeasurable kind of sanctity, stimulated a more indifferent sort of
curiosity, and seemed to bring the distant, the impossible, as with
tangible evidence of fact, close to one's side. It was in one's
hand--the finger of an Evangelist! The crowned head of Saint Lubin,
bishop of Chartres [31] long centuries since, but still able to
preserve its wheat-stacks from fire; bones of the "Maries," with some
of the earth from their grave; these, and the like of these, was what
the curious eye discerned in the recesses of those variously
contrived reliquaries, great and small, glittering so profusely about
the dusky church, itself ministering, by its very shadows, to a
certain appetite in the soul of Gaston for dimness--for a dim place
like this--such as he had often prefigured to himself, albeit with
some suspicion of what might seem a preference for darkness.
Physical twilight we most of us love, in its season. To him, that
perpetual twilight came in close identity with its moral or
intellectual counterpart, as the welcome requisite for that part of
the soul which loves twilight, and is, in truth, never quite at rest
out of it, through some congenital uneasiness or distress, perhaps,
in its processes of vision.
Well! what was of the past there--the actual stones of the temple and
that sacred liturgical order--entered readily enough into Gaston's
mental kingdom, filling places prepared by the anticipations of his
tranquil, dream-struck youth. It was the present, the uncalculated
present, which now disturbed the complacent habit of his thoughts,
proposing itself, importunately, in the living forms of his immediate
companions, in the great clerical body of which he was become a part,
in the people of Chartres itself (none the less animated because
provincial) as [33] a thing, alien at a thousand points from his
preconceptions of life, to be judged by him, to be rejected or
located within. How vivid, how delightful, they were!--the other
forty-nine of the fifty lads who had come hither, after the old-
fashioned way, to serve in the household of Monseigneur by way of an
"institution" in learning and good manners, as to which a grave
national assembly, more than three centuries before the States-
General of 1789, had judged French youth of quality somewhat
behindhand, recommending king and nobles to take better care for the
future of their education, "to the end that, enlightened and
moralised, they might know their duties, and be less likely to abuse
their privileges."
And how becomingly that cleric pride, that self-respecting quiet, sat
upon their high-bred figures, their angelic, unspoiled faces,
saddened transiently as they came under the religious spell for a
moment. As for Gaston, they welcomed him with perfect friendliness,
kept their best side foremost for an hour, and would not leave his
very dreams. In absolute unconsciousness, they had brought from
their remote old homes all varieties of hereditary gifts, vices,
distinctions, dark fates, mercy, cruelty, madness. Appetite and
vanity abounded, but with an abundant superficial grace, befitting a
generation which, as by some aesthetic sense in the air, made the
most of the pleasant outsides of life. All the [34] various traits
of the dying Middle Age were still in evidence among them, in all
their crude effectiveness; only, blent, like rusty old armour
wreathed in flowers, with the peculiar fopperies of the time,
shrewdly divined from a distance, as happens with competent youth.
To be in Paris itself, amid the full, delightful, fragrance of those
dainty visible things which Huguenots despised:--that, surely, were
the sum of good-fortune! Half-clerical, they loved nevertheless the
touch of steel; had a laughing joy in trifling with its latent soul
of destruction. In mimicry of the great world, they had their
leaders, so inscrutably self-imposed:--instinctively, they felt and
underwent that mystery of leadership, with its consequent heats of
spirit, its tides and changes of influence.
On the other hand also, to Gaston, dreamily observant, it was quaint,
likeable, the way they had of reproducing, unsuspectingly, the
humours of animal nature. Does not the anthropologist tell us of a
heraldry, with a large assortment of heraldic beasts, to be found
among savage or half-savage peoples, as the "survival" of a period
when men were nearer than they are or seem to be now, to the
irrational world? Throughout the sprightly movement of the lads'
daily life it was as if their "tribal" pets or monsters were with or
within them. Tall Exmes, lithe and cruel like a tiger--it was
pleasant to stroke him. The tiger was there, the parrot, the hare,
the goat of course, and certainly much apishness. [35] And, one and
all, they were like the creatures, in their vagrant, short, memories,
alert perpetually on the topmost crest of the day and hour,
transferred so heartlessly, so entirely, from yesterday to to-day.
Yet out of them, sure of some response, human heart did break:--in
and around Camille Pontdormi, for instance, brilliant and ambitious,
yet so sensitive about his threadbare home, concerning which however
he had made the whole company, one by one, his confidants--so loyal
to the people there, bursting into wild tears over the letter which
brought the news of his younger brother's death, visibly fretting
over it long afterwards. Still, for the most part, in their perfect
health, nothing seemed to reach them but their own boyish ordinances,
their own arbitrary "form." It was an absolute indifference; most
striking when they lifted their well-trained voices to sing in choir,
vacant as the sparrows, while the eloquent, far-reaching, aspiring
words floated melodiously from them, sometimes, with truly medieval
license, singing to the sacred music those songs from the streets (no
one cared to detect) which were really in their hearts. A world of
vanity and appetite, yet after all of honesty with itself! Like
grown people, they were but playing a game, and meant to observe its
rules. Say, rather, a world of honesty, and of courage! They, at
least, were not preoccupied all day long, and, if they woke in the
night, with the fear of death.
Here and now, at all events, carrying their cheerful tumult through
all those quiet ecclesiastical places--the bishop's garden, the great
sacristy, neat and clean in its brown, pensive lights, they seemed of
a piece with the bright, simple, inanimate things, the toys, of
nature. They made one lively picture with the fruit and wine they
loved, the birds they captured, the buckets of clear water drawn for
pastime from [37] the great well, and Jean S�mur's painted conjuring
book stolen from the old sorceress, his grandmother, out of which he
told their fortunes; with the musical instruments of others; with
their carefully hidden dice and playing-cards, worn or soiled by the
fingers of the older gamesters who had discarded them. Like their
elders, they read eagerly, in racy, new translations, old Greek and
Latin books, with a delightful shudder at the wanton paganism. It
was a new element of confusion in the presentment of that miniature
world. The classical enthusiasm laid hold on Gaston too, but essayed
in vain to thrust out of him the medieval character of his
experience, or put on quite a new face, insinuating itself rather
under cover of the Middle Age, still in occupation all around him.
Venus, Mars, Aeneas, haunted, in contemporary shape, like ghosts of
folk one had known, the places with which he was familiar. Latin
might still seem the fittest language for oratory, sixteen hundred
years after Cicero was dead; those old Roman pontiffs, draped
grandly, sat in the stalls of the choir; Propertius made love to
Cynthia in the raiment of the foppish Amad�e; they played Terence,
and it was but a play within a play. Above all, in natural,
heartfelt kinship with their own violent though refined and cunning
time, they loved every incident of soldiering; while the changes of
the year, the lights, the shadows, the flickering fires of winter,
with [38] which Gaston had first associated his companions, so full
of artificial enjoyment for the well-to-do, added themselves
pleasantly, by way of shifting background, to the spectacular effect.
It was the brilliant surface with which the untried world confronted
him. Touch it where you might, you felt the resistant force of the
solid matter of human experience--of human experience, in its strange
mixture of beauty and evil, its sorrow, its ill-assorted fates, its
pathetic acquiescence; above all, in its overpowering certainty, over
against his own world of echoes and shadows, which perhaps only
seemed to be so much as echoes or shadows. A nature with the
capacity of worship, he was straightway challenged, as by a rival new
religion claiming to supersede the religion he knew, to identify
himself conclusively with this so tangible world, its suppositions,
its issues, its risks. Here was a world, certainly, which did not
halt in meditation, but prompted one to make actual trial of it, with
a liberty of heart which might likely enough traverse this or that
precept (if it were not rather a mere scruple) of his earlier
conscience. These its children, at all events, were, as he felt, in
instinctive sympathy with its motions; had shrewd divinations of the
things men really valued, and waited on them with unquestioning
docility. Two worlds, two antagonistic ideals, were in evidence
before him. Could a third condition supervene, to mend their
discord, or [39] only vex him perhaps, from time to time, with
efforts towards an impossible adjustment?
For a hard winter, like that famous winter of 1567, the hardest that
had been known for fifty years, makes an end of the weak--the aged,
the very young. To the robust, how pleasant had the preparation for
it seemed--the scent of the first wood-fire upon the keen October
air; the earth turning from grey to black under the plough; the great
stacks of fuel, come down lazily from the woods of Le Perche, along
the winding Eure; its wholesome perfume; the long, soothing nights,
and early twilight. The mind of Gaston, for one, was touched by the
sense of some remote and delicate beauty in these things, like
magicians' work, like an effect of magic as being extorted from
unsuspected sources.
What winter really brought however, was the danger and vexation of a
great siege. The householders of catholic Chartres had watched the
forces of their Huguenot enemies gathering from this side and that;
and at last the dreaded circle was complete. They were prisoners
like [46] the rest, Gaston and the grandparents, shut up in their
little hotel; and Gaston, face to face with it, understood at last
what war really means. After all, it took them by surprise. It was
early in the day. A crowd of worshippers filled the church of
Sainte-Foy, built partly upon the ramparts; and at the conclusion of
the mass, the Sacrament was to be carried to a sick person. Touched
by unusual devotion at this perilous time, the whole assembly rose to
escort the procession on its way, passing out slowly, group after
group, as if by mechanical instinct, the more reluctant led on by the
general consent. Gaston, the last lingerer, halting to let others
proceed quietly before him, turned himself about to gaze upon the
deserted church, half tempted to remain, ere he too stepped forth
lightly and leisurely, when under a shower of massy stones from the
coulevrines or great cannon of the besiegers, the entire roof of the
place sank into the empty space behind him. But it was otherwise in
a neighbouring church, crushed, in a similar way, with all its good
people, not long afterwards.
And in the midst of the siege, with all its tumult about her, the old
grandmother died, to the undissembled sorrow of Gaston, bereft,
unexpectedly as it seemed, of the gentle creature, to whom he had
always turned for an affection, that had been as no other in its
absolute incapacity of offence. A tear upon the cheek, like [47] the
bark of a tree, testified to some unfulfilled hope, something wished
for but not to be, which left resignation, by nature or grace, still
imperfect, and made death at fourscore years and ten seem, after all,
like a premature summons in the midst of one's days. For a few
hours, the peace which followed brought back to the face a protesting
gleam of youth, far antecedent to anything Gaston could possibly have
remembered there, moving him to a pity, a peculiar sense of pleading
helplessness, which to the end of his life was apt to revive at the
sight (it might be in an animal) of what must perforce remember that
it had been young but was old.
That broken link with life seemed to end some other things for him.
As one puts away the toys of childhood, so now he seemed to discard
what had been the central influence of his earlier youth, what more
than anything else had stirred imagination and brought the
consciousness of his own life warm and full. Gazing now upon the
"holy and beautiful place," as he had gazed on the dead face, for a
moment he seemed to anticipate the indifference of age. And when not
long after the rude hands of catholics themselves, at their wits' end
for the maintenance of the "religious war," spoiled it of the
accumulated treasure of centuries, leaving Notre-Dame de Chartres in
the bareness with which we see it to-day, he had no keen sense of
personal loss.
III. MODERNITY
[48] The besieging armies disappeared like the snow, leaving city and
suburb in all the hardened soilure of war and winter, which only the
torrents of spring would carry away. And the spring came suddenly:
it was pleasant, after that long confinement, to walk afar securely
through its early fervours. Gaston too went forth on his way home,
not alone. Three chosen companions went with him, pledged to the old
manor for months to come; its lonely ancient master welcoming readily
the tread of youth about him.
So they made their way, under the rows of miraculous white thorn-
blossom, and through the green billows, at peace just then, though
the war still blazed or smouldered along the southern banks of the
Loire and far beyond, and it was with a delightful sense of peril, of
prowess attested in the facing of it, that they passed from time to
time half-ruined or deserted farm-buildings where the remnants of the
armies might yet be lingering. It was Jasmin, poetic Jasmin, who, in
giving Gaston the book he now carried ever ready to hand, had done
him perhaps the best of services, for it had proved the key to a new
world of seemingly boundless intellectual resources, and yet with a
special closeness to visible or sensuous things;--the scent and
colour of the field-flowers, the amorous business of the birds, the
flush and re-fledging of the black earth itself in that fervent
springtide, which was therefore unique in Gaston's memory. It was
his intellectual springtide; as people look back to [51] a physical
spring, which for once in ten or fifteen years, for once in a
lifetime, was all that spring could be.
The book was none other than Pierre de Ronsard's "Odes," with
"Mignonne! allons voir si la Rose," and "The Skylark" and the lines
to April--itself verily like nothing so much as a jonquil, in its
golden-green binding and yellow edges and perfume of the place where
it had lain--sweet, but with something of the sickliness of all
spring flowers since the days of Proserpine. Just eighteen years
old, and the work of the poet's own youth, it took possession of
Gaston with the ready intimacy of one's equal in age, fresh at every
point; and he experienced what it is the function of contemporary
poetry to effect anew for sensitive youth in each succeeding
generation. The truant and irregular poetry of his own nature, all
in solution there, found an external and authorised mouthpiece,
ranging itself rightfully, as the latest achievement of human soul in
this matter, along with the consecrated poetic voices of the past.
And yet the gifted poet seemed but to have spoken what was already in
Gaston's own mind, what he had longed to say, had been just going to
say; so near it came, that it had the charm [56] of a discovery of
one's own. That was an illusion, perhaps; it was because the poet
told one so much about himself, making so free a display of what
though personal was very contagious; of his love-secrets especially,
how love and nothing else filled his mind. He was in truth but
"love's secretary," noting from hour to hour its minutely changing
fortunes. Yes! that was the reason why visible, audible, sensible
things glowed so brightly, why there was such luxury in sounds,
words, rhythms, of the new light come on the world, of that wonderful
freshness. With a masterly appliance of what was near and familiar,
or again in the way of bold innovation, he found new words for
perennially new things, and the novel accent awakened long-slumbering
associations. Never before had words, single words, meant so much.
What expansion, what liberty of heart, in speech: how associable to
music, to singing, the written lines! He sang of the lark, and it
was the lark's voluble self. The physical beauty of humanity lent
itself to every object, animate or inanimate, to the very hours and
lapses and changes of time itself. An almost burdensome fulness of
expression haunted the gestures, the very dress, the personal
ornaments, of the people on the highway. Even Jacques Bonhomme at
his labour, or idling for an hour, borrowed from his love, homely as
it was, a touch of dignity or grace, and some secret of utterance,
which made [57] one think of Italy or Greece. The voice of the
shepherd calling, the chatter of the shepherdess turning her spindle,
seemed to answer, or wait for answer,--to be fragments of love's
ideal and eternal communing.
From the poem fancy wandered to the poet, and curious youth would
fain see the writer in person,--what a poet was like, with anxious
surmises, this way and that, as to the degree in which the precious
mental particles might be expected to have wrought up the outward
presence to their own high quality. A creature of the eye, in this
case at least, the intellectual hold on him being what it was, Gaston
had no fear of disillusion. His poetic readings had borrowed an
additional relish from the genial, companionable, manner of his life
at this time, taking him into the remotest corners of the vast level
land, and its outer ring of blue up-lands; amid which, as he rode one
day with "the three," towards perfectly new prospects, he had chanced
on some tangible rumour of the great poet's present abode. The hill
they had mounted at leisure, in talk with a village priest, dropped
suddenly upon a vague tract of wood and pasture, [59] with a dark
ridge beyond towards the south-west; and the black notch, which broke
its outline against the mellow space of evening light, was the
steeple of the priory of Croix-val, of which reverend body Pierre de
Ronsard, although a layman, was, by special favour of King Charles,
Superior.
Though a formal peace was come, though the primary movers of war had
taken hands or kissed each other, and were exchanging suspicious
courtesies, yet the unquiet temper of war was still abroad
everywhere, with an after-crop of miserable incidents. The
captainless national and mercenary soldiers were become in large
number thieves or beggars, and the peasant's hand sank back to the
tame labour of the plough reluctantly. Relieved a little by the
sentimental humour of the hour, lending, as Ronsard prompted, a
poetic and always amorous interest to everything around him, poor
Gaston's very human soul was vexed nevertheless at the spectacle of
the increased hardness of human life, with certain misgivings from
time to time at the contrast of his own luxurious tranquillity. The
homeless woman suckling her babe at the roadside, the grey-beard
hasting before the storm, the tattered fortune-teller who, when he
shook his head at her proposal to "read his hand," assured him
(perhaps with some insight into his character) "You do that"--you
shake your head, negatively--"too much!" these, and the like, [60]
might count as fitting human accidents in an impassioned landscape
picture. And his new imaginative culture had taught him to value
"surprises" in nature itself; the quaint, exciting charm of the
mistletoe in the wood, of the blossom before the leaf, the cry of
passing birds at night. Nay! the most familiar details of nature,
its daily routine of light and darkness, beset him now with a kind of
troubled and troubling eloquence. The rain, the first streak of
dawn, the very sullenness of the sky, had a power, only to be
described by saying that they seemed to be moral facts.
On his way at last to gaze on the abode of the new hero or demi-god
of poetry, Gaston perceives increasingly, as another excellence of
his verse, how truthful, how close it is to the minute fact of the
scene around; as there are pleasant wines which, expressing the
peculiar quality of their native soil, lose their special
pleasantness away from home. The physiognomy of the scene was
changed; the plain of La Beauce had ruffled itself into low green
hills and gently winding valleys, with clear, quick water, and
fanciful patches of heath and wood-land. Here and there a secular
oak tree maintained a solitude around it. It was the district of the
"little river Loir"--the Vendomois; and here, in its own country, the
new poetry, notwithstanding its classic elegance, might seem a native
wild flower, modest enough.
[61] He came riding with his companions towards evening along the
road which had suddenly abandoned its day-long straightness for
wanton curves and ascents; and there, as an owl on the wing cried
softly, beyond the tops of the spreading poplars was the west front,
silver-grey, and quiet, inexpressibly quiet, with its worn, late-
gothic "flamings" from top to bottom, as full of reverie to Gaston's
thinking as the enchanted castle in a story-book. The village lay
thinly scattered around the wide, grass-grown space; below was the
high espaliered garden-wall, and within it, visible through the open
doors, a gaunt figure, hook-nosed, like a wizard, at work with the
spade, too busily to turn and look. Or was it that he did not hear
at all the question repeated thrice:--Could one see His Reverence the
Prior, at least in his convent church? "You see him" was the answer,
as a face, all nerve, distressed nerve, turned upon them not
unkindly, the vanity of the great man aware and pleasantly tickled.
The unexpected incident had quickened a prematurely aged pulse, and
in reward for their good service the young travellers were bidden
carry their equipment, not to the village inn, but to the guest-
chamber of the half-empty priory. The eminent man of letters, who
had been always an enthusiastic gardener, though busy just now not
with choice flowers but with salutary kitchen-stuff, working indeed
with much effort, to counteract the gout, was ready enough [62] in
his solitude to make the most of chance visitors, especially youthful
ones. A bell clanged; he laid aside the spade, and casting an eye at
the whirling weather-vanes announced that it would snow. There had
been no "sunset." They had travelled away imperceptibly from genial
afternoon into a world of ashen evening.
The snow was falling now in big, slow flakes, a great fire blazing
under the chimney with its cipher and enigmatic motto, as they sat
down to the leek-soup, the hard eggs, and the salad grown and
gathered by their host's own hands. The long stone passages through
which they passed from church, with the narrow brown doors of the
monks' dormitories one after another along the white-washed wall,
made the coquetries of the Prior's own distant apartment all the more
reassuring. You remembered that from his ninth year he had been the
pet of princesses, the favourite of kings. Upon the cabinets,
chests, book-cases, around, were ranged the souvenirs received from
various royal persons, including three kings of France, the fair
Queen of Scots, Elizabeth of England; and the conversation fell to,
and was kept going by, the precious contents of the place where they
were sitting, the books printed and bound as they had never been
before--books which meant assiduous study, the theory of poetry with
Ronsard always accompanying its practice--delicate things of art,
which beauty had handled or might handle, the pictured faces on the
walls, in their frames of reeded ebony or jewelled filigree. There
was the Minerva, decreed him at a conference of the elegant, pedantic
"Jeux Floraux," which had proclaimed [64] Pierre de Ronsard "Prince
of Poets." The massive silver image Ronsard had promptly offered to
his patron King Charles; but in vain, for, though so greatly in want
of ready-money that he melted down church ornaments and exacted
"black" contributions from the clergy, one of the things in which
Charles had ever been sincere was a reverence for literature.
So there it stood, doing duty for Our Lady, with gothic crown and a
fresh sprig of consecrated box, bringing the odd, enigmatic
physiognomy, preferred by the art of that day, within the sphere of
religious devotion. The King's manuscript, declining, in verse
really as good as Ronsard's, the honour not meant for him, might be
read, attached to the pedestal. The ladies of his own verse, Marie,
Cassandre, and the rest, idols one after another of a somewhat
artificial and for the most part unrequited love, from the Angevine
maiden--La petite pucelle Angevine--who had vexed his young soul by
her inability to yield him more than a faint Platonic affection, down
to Helen, to whom he had been content to propose no other, gazed,
more impassibly than ever, from the walls.
They might have been sisters, those many successive loves, or one and
the same lady over and over again, in slightly varied humour and
attire perhaps, at the different intervals of some rather lengthy,
mimetic masque of love, to which the theatrical dress of that day was
appropriate; [65] for the mannered Italian, or Italianised, artists,
including the much-prized, native Janet, with his favourite water-
green backgrounds, aware of the poet's predilection, had given to all
alike the same brown eyes and tender eyelids and golden hair and
somewhat ambered paleness, varying only the curious artifices of the
dress--knots, and nets, and golden spider-work, and clear, flat
stones. Dangerous guests in that simple, cloistral place, Sibyls of
the Renaissance on a mission from Italy to France, to Gaston one and
all seemed under the burden of some weighty message concerning a
world unknown to him; the stealthy lines of cheek and brow contriving
to express it, while the lips and eyes only smiled, not quite
honestly. It had been a learned love, with undissembled "hatred of
the vulgar." Three royal Margarets, much-praised pearls of three
succeeding generations (for to the curious in these objects purity is
far from being the only measure of value) asserted charms a thought
more frank, or French, though still gracefully pedantic, with their
quaintly kerchiefed books--books of what?--in their pale hands.
Among the ladies, on the pictured wall as in life, were the poet's
male companions, stirring memories of a more material sort, though
their common interest had been poetry--memories of that "Bohemia,"
which even a prince of court poets had frequented when he was young,
of his cruder youthful vanities. [66] In some cases the date of death
was inscribed below.
One there was among them, the youngest, of whose genial fame to come
this experienced judge of men and books, two years before "St.
Bartholomew's," was confident--a crowned boy, King Charles himself.
Here perhaps was the single entirely disinterested sentiment of the
poet's life, wholly independent of a long list of benefits, or
benefices; for the younger had turned winsomely, appealingly, to the
elder, who, forty years of age, feeling chilly at the thought, had no
son. And of one only of those companions did the memory bring a
passing cloud. It was long ago, on a journey, that he had first
spoken, accidentally, with Joachim du Bellay, whose friendship had
been the great intellectual fortune of his life. For a moment one
saw the encounter at the wayside inn, in the broad, gay morning, a
quarter of a century since; and there was the face--deceased at
thirty-five. Pensive, plaintive, refined by sickness, of exceeding
delicacy, it must from the first have been best suited to the
greyness of an hour like this. To-morrow, where will be the snow?
The leader in that great poetic battle of the Pleiad, their host
himself (he explained the famous device, and named the seven chief
stars in the constellation) was depicted appropriately, in veritable
armour, with antique Roman cuirass of minutely inlaid gold, and
flowered mantle; [67] the crisp, ceremonial, laurel-wreath of the
Roman conqueror lying on the audacious, over-developed brows, above
the great hooked nose of practical enterprise. In spite of his
pretension to the Epicurean conquest of a kingly indifference of
mind, the portrait of twenty years ago betrayed, not less than the
living face with its roving, astonished eyes, the haggard soul of a
haggard generation, whose eagerly-sought refinements had been after
all little more than a theatrical make-believe--an age of wild
people, of insane impulse, of homicidal mania. The sweet-souled
songster had no more than others attained real calm in it. Even in
youth nervous distress had been the chief facial characteristic.
Triumphant, nevertheless, in his battle for Greek beauty--for the
naturalisation of Greek beauty in the brown cloud-lands of the North-
-he might have been thinking, contemptuously, of barking little
Saint-Gelais, or of Monsieur Marot's pack-thread poems. He, for his
part, had always held that poetry should be woven of delicate silk,
or of fine linen, or at least of good home-spun worsted.
It was but a half-gaiety, in truth, that awoke in the poet even now,
with the singing and the good wine, as the notes echoed windily along
the passages. On his forty-sixth year the unaffected melancholy of
his later life was already gathering. The dead!--he was coming to be
on their side. The fact came home to Gaston that this evocator of
"the eternally youthful" was visibly old before his time; his work
being done, or centered now for the most part on amendments, not
invariably happy, of his earlier [69] verse. The little panelled
drawers were full of them. The poet pulled out one, and as it stood
open for a moment there lay the first book of the Franciade, in
silken cover, white and gold, ready for the king's hands, but never
to be finished.
[73] Those searchings of mind brought from time to time cruel starts
from sleep, a sudden shudder at any wide outlook over life and its
issues, draughts of mental east-wind across the hot mornings, into
which the voices of his companions called him, to lose again in long
rambles every thought save that of his own firm, abounding youth.
These rambles were but the last, sweet, wastefully-spent remnants of
a happy season. The letter for Monsieur Michel de Montaigne was to
hand, with preparations for the distant journey which must presently
break up their comradeship. Nevertheless, its actual termination
overtook them at the last as if by surprise: on a sudden that
careless interval of time was over.
The fact that armed persons were still abroad, thieves or assassins,
lurking under many disguises, [75] might explain what happened on the
last evening of their time together, when they sat late at the open
windows as the night increased, serene but covered summer night,
aromatic, velvet-footed. What coolness it had was pleasant after the
wine; and they strolled out, fantastically muffled in certain old
heraldic dresses of parade, caught up in the hall as they passed
through, Gaston alone remaining to attend on his grandfather. In
about an hour's time they returned, not a little disconcerted, to
tell a story of which Gaston was reminded (seeing them again in
thought as if only half real, amid the bloomy night, with blood upon
their boyish flowers) as they crossed his path afterwards at three
intervals. Listening for the night-hawk, pushing aside the hedge-row
to catch the evening breath of the honeysuckle, they had sauntered
on, scarcely looking in advance, along the causeway. Soft sounds
came out of the distance, but footsteps on the hard road they had not
heard, when three others fronted them face to face--Jasmin, Amad�e,
and Camille--their very selves, visible in the light of the lantern
carried by Camille: they might have felt the breath upon their
cheeks: real, close, definite, cap for cap, plume for plume, flower
for flower, a light like their own flashed up counter-wise, but with
blood, all three of them, fresh upon the bosom, or in the mouth. It
was well to draw the sword, be one's enemy carnal or spiritual; even
devils, [76] as wise men know, taking flight at its white glitter
through the air. Out flashed the brave youths' swords, still with
mimic counter-motion, upon nothing--upon the empty darkness before
them.
Under such genial conditions, then, Gaston set out towards those
south-west regions he had [77] always yearned to, as popular
imagination just now set thither also, in a vision of French ships
going forth from the mouths of the Loire and the Gironde, from
Nantes, Bordeaux, and La Rochelle, to the Indies, in rivalry of
Spanish adventure. The spasmodic gaiety of the time blent with that
of the season of the year, of his own privileged time of life, and
allowed the opulent country through which he was to pass all its
advantages. Ever afterwards that low ring of blue hills beyond La
Beauce meant more for him, not less, than of old. After the reign of
his native apple-blossom and corn, it was that of peach-blossom and
wine. Southwards to Orleans and the Loire then, with the course of
the sunny river, to Blois, to Amboise, to Tours, he traversed a
region of unquestioned natural charm, heightened greatly by the
mental atmosphere through which it reached him. Black Angers, white
Saumur, with its double in the calm broad water below, the melancholy
seigneurial woods of Blois, ranged themselves in his memory as so
many distinct types of what was dignified or pleasant in human
habitations. Frequently, along the great historic stream, as along
some vast street, contemporary genius was visible (a little
prematurely as time would show) in a novel and seductive
architecture, which, by its engrafting of exotic grace on homely
native forms, spoke of a certain restless aspiration to be what one
was not but might become--the old [78] Gaulish desire to be refined,
to be mentally enfranchised by the sprightlier genius of Italy. With
their terraced gardens, their airy galleries, their triumphal
chimney-pieces, their spacious stairways, their conscious provision
for the elegant enjoyment of all seasons in turn, here surely were
the new abodes for the new humanity of this new, poetic, picturesque
age. What but flawless bodies, duly appointed to typically developed
souls, could move on the daily business of life through these dreamy
apartments into which he entered from time to time, finding their
very garniture like a personal presence in them? Was there light
here in the earth itself? It was a landscape, certainly, which did
not merely accept the sun, but flashed it back gratefully from the
white, gracious, carven houses, that were like a natural part of it.
As he passed below, fancy would sometimes credit the outlook from
their lofty gables with felicities of combination beyond possibility.
What prospects of mountain and sea-shore from those aerial window-
seats!
And in a while the dominant course of the river itself, the animation
of its steady, downward flow, even amid the sand-shoals and
whispering islets of the dry season, bore his thoughts beyond it, in
a sudden irresistible appetite for the sea; and he determined,
varying slightly from the prescribed route, to reach his destination
by way [80] of the coast. From Nantes he descended imperceptibly
along tall hedge-rows of acacia, till on a sudden, with a novel
freshness in the air, through a low archway of laden fruit-trees it
was visible--sand, sea, and sky, in three quiet spaces, line upon
line. The features of the landscape changed again, and the gardens,
the rich orchards, gave way to bare, grassy undulations: only, the
open sandy spaces presented their own native flora, for the fine
silex seemed to have crept into the tall, wiry stalks of the ixias,
like grasses the seeds of which had expanded, by solar magic, into
veritable flowers, crimson, green, or yellow patched with black.
But the books dropped from his hands in the very midst of
enthusiastic quotation; and the guest was mounting a little turret
staircase, was on the leaden roof of the old tower, amid the fat,
noonday Gascon scenery. He saw, in bird's-eye view, the country he
was soon to become closely acquainted with, a country (like its
people) of passion and capacity, though at that moment emphatically
lazy. Towards the end of life some conscientious pangs seem to have
touched Montaigne's singularly humane and sensitive spirit, when he
looked back on the [89] long intellectual entertainment he had had,
in following, as an inactive spectator, "the ruin of his country,"
through a series of chapters, every one of which had told
emphatically in his own immediate neighbourhood. With its old and
new battlefields, its business, its fierce changes, and the old
perennial sameness of men's ways beneath them all, it had been
certainly matter of more assiduous reading than even those choice,
incommensurable, books, of ancient Greek and Roman experience. The
variableness, the complexity, the miraculous surprises of man,
concurrent with the variety, the complexity, the surprises of nature,
making all true knowledge of either wholly relative and provisional;
a like insecurity in one's self, if one turned thither for some ray
of clear and certain evidence; this, with an equally strong sense all
the time of the interest, the power and charm, alike of man and
nature and of the individual mind;--such was the sense of this open
book, of all books and things. That was what this quietly
enthusiastic reader was ready to assert as the sum of his studies;
disturbingly, as Gaston found, reflecting on his long unsuspicious
sojourn there, and detaching from the habits, the random traits of
character, his concessions and hints and sudden emphatic statements,
the soul and potency of the man.
V. SUSPENDED JUDGMENT
Here, as it seemed to Gaston, was one for whom exceptions had taken
the place of law: the very genius of qualification followed him
through all his keen, constant, changeful consideration of men and
things. How many curious moral variations he had to show!--"vices
that are lawful": vices in us which "help to make up the seam in our
piecing, as poisons are useful for the conservation of health":
"actions good and excusable that are not lawful in themselves": "the
soul discharging her passions upon false objects where the true are
wanting": men doing more than they propose, or they hardly know what,
at immense hazard, or pushed to do well by vice itself, or working
for their enemies: "condemnations more criminal than the crimes they
condemn": the excuses that are self-accusations: instances, from his
own experience, of a hasty confidence in other men's virtue which
"God had favoured": and how, "even to the worst people, it is sweet,
their end once gained by a vicious act, to foist into it some show of
justice." In the presence of this indefatigable analyst of act and
motive all fixed outlines seemed to vanish away. The healthful
pleasure of motion, of thoughts in motion!--Yes! Gaston felt them,
the oldest of [95] them, moving, as he listened, under and away from
his feet, as if with the ground he stood on. And this was the vein
of thought which oftenest led the master back contemptuously to
emphasise the littleness of man.--"I think we can never be despised
according to our full desert."
For him there had been two grand surprises, two pre-eminent
manifestations of the power and charm of man, not to be explained
away,--one, within the compass of general and public observation: the
other, a matter of special intimacy to himself. There had been the
greatness of the old Greek and Roman life, so greatly recorded: there
had been the wisdom and kindness of Etienne de la Boetie, as made
known in all their fulness to him alone. That his ardent devotion to
the ancients had been rewarded with minute knowledge concerning them,
was the privilege of the age in which he was born, late in the
Revival of Letters. But the classical reading, which with others was
often but an affectation, seducing them from the highest to a lower
degree of reality, from men and women to their mere shadows in old
books, had been for him nothing less than personal contact. "The
qualities and fortunes" of the old Romans, especially, their
wonderful straight ways through the world, the straight passage of
their armies upon them, the splendour of their armour, of their
entire external presence and show, their "riches and embellishments,"
above all, "the suddenness of Augustus," in that grander age for
which decision was justifiable because really [98] possible, had ever
been "more in his head than the fortunes of his own country." If "we
have no hold even on things present but by imagination," as he loved
to observe,--then, how much more potent, steadier, larger, the
imaginative substance of the world of Alexander and Socrates, of
Virgil and Caesar, than that of an age, which seemed to him, living
in the midst of it, respectable mainly by its docility, by an
imitation of the ancients which after all left untouched the real
sources of their greatness. They had been indeed great, at the least
dramatically, redeemed in part by magnificent courage and tact, in
their very sins. "Our force is no more able to reach them in their
vicious than in their virtuous qualities; for both the one and the
other proceed from a vigour of soul which was without comparison
greater in them than in us."
And the surprises there are in man, his complexity, his variancy,
were symptomatic of the changefulness, the confusion, the surprises,
of the earth under one's feet, of the whole material world. The
irregular, the unforeseen, the inconsecutive, miracle, accident, he
noted lovingly: it had a philosophic import. It was habit rather
than knowledge of them that took away the strangeness of the things
actually about one. How many unlikely matters there were, testified
by persons worthy of faith, "which, if we cannot persuade ourselves
to believe, we ought at least to leave in suspense.--Though all that
had arrived by report of past time should be true, it would be less
than nothing in comparison of what is unknown."
And that new light was sure to lead him back very soon to his
"governing method, ignorance"--an ignorance "strong and generous, and
that yields nothing in honour and courage to knowledge; an ignorance,
which to conceive requires no less knowledge than to conceive [104]
knowledge itself"--a sapient, instructed, shrewdly ascertained
ignorance, suspended judgment, doubt everywhere.--Balances, very
delicate balances; he was partial to that image of equilibrium, or
preponderance, in things. But was there, after all, so much as
preponderance anywhere? To Gaston there was a kind of fascination,
an actually aesthetic beauty, in the spectacle of that keen-edged
intelligence, dividing evidence so finely, like some exquisite steel
instrument with impeccable sufficiency, always leaving the last word
loyally to the central intellectual faculty, in an entire
disinterestedness. If on the one hand he was always distrustful of
things that he wished, on the other he had many opinions he would
endeavour to make his son dislike, if he had one. What if the truest
opinions were not always the most commodious to man, "being of so
wild a composition"? He would say nothing to one party that he might
not on occasion say to the other, "with a little alteration of
accent." Yes! Doubt, everywhere! doubt in the far background, as
the proper intellectual equivalent to the infinite possibilities of
things: doubt, shrewdly economising the opportunities of the present
hour, in the very spirit of the traveller who walks only for the
walk's sake,--"every day concludes my expectation, and the journey of
my life is carried on after the same fashion": doubt, finally, as
"the best of pillows to sleep on." And in fact Gaston did sleep well
after [105] those long days of physical and intellectual movement, in
that quiet world, till the spring came round again.
But beyond and above all the various interests upon which the
philosopher's mind was for ever afloat, there was one subject always
in prominence--himself. His minute peculiarities, mental and
physical, what was constitutional with him as well as his transient
humours, how things affected him, what they really were to him,
Michael, much more than man, all this Gaston came to know, as the
world knew it afterwards in the Essays, often amused, sometimes
irritated, but never suspicious of postures, or insincerity.
Montaigne himself admitted his egotism with frank humour:--"in favour
of the Huguenots, who condemn our private confession, I confess
myself in public." And this outward egotism of manner was but the
symptom of a certain deeper doctrinal egotism:--"I have no other end
in writing but to discover myself." And what was the purport, what
the justification, of this undissembled egotism? It was the
recognition, over against, or in continuation of, that world of
floating doubt, of the individual mind, as for each one severally, at
once the unique organ, and the only matter, of knowledge,--the
wonderful energy, the reality and authority of that, in its absolute
loneliness, conforming all things to its law, without witnesses as
without judge, without appeal, save to itself. [106] Whatever truth
there might be, must come for each one from within, not from without.
To that wonderful microcosm of the individual soul, of which, for
each one, all other worlds are but elements,--to himself,--to what
was apparent immediately to him, what was "properly of his own having
and substance": he confidently dismissed the inquirer. His own
egotism was but the pattern of the true intellectual life of every
one. "The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know that he
is his own. If the world find fault that I speak too much of myself,
I find fault that they do not so much as think of themselves." How
it had been "lodged in its author":--that, surely, was the essential
question, concerning every opinion that comes to one man from
another.
One's own experience!--that, at least, was one's own: low and earthy,
it might be; still, the earth was, emphatically, good, good-natured;
and he loved, emphatically, to recommend the wisdom, amid all doubts,
of keeping close to it. Gaston soon knew well a certain threadbare
garment worn by Montaigne in all their rides together, sitting
quaintly on his otherwise gallant appointments,--an old mantle that
had belonged to his father. Retained, as he tells us, in spite of
its inconvenience, "because it seemed to envelope me in him," it was
the symbol of a hundred natural, perhaps somewhat material, pieties.
Parentage, kinship, relationship through earth,--the touch of that
was everywhere like a caress to him. His fine taste notwithstanding,
he loved, in those long rambles, to partake of homely fare, paying
largely for it. Everywhere it was as if the earth in him turned
kindly to [108] earth. "Under the sun," the sturdy purple thistles,
the blossoming burrs also, were worth knowing. Let us grow together
with you! they seem to say. Himself was one of those whom he thought
"Heaven favoured" in making them die, so naturally, by degrees. "I
shall be blind before I am sensible of the decay of my sight, with
such kindly artifice do the Fatal Sisters entwist our lives. I melt,
and steal away from myself. How variously is it no longer I!" It
was not he who would carry a furry robe at midsummer, because he
might need it in the winter.--"In fine, we must live among the
living, and let the river flow under the bridge without our care,
above all things avoiding fear, that great disturber of reason. The
thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear."
Was that why his conversation was sometimes coarse? "All the
contraries are to be found in [111] me, in one corner or another"; if
delicacy, so also coarseness. Delicacy there was, certainly,--a
wonderful fineness of sensation. "To the end," he tells us, "that
sleep should not so stupidly escape from me, I have caused myself to
be disturbed in my sleep, so that I might the better and more
sensibly taste and relish it.--Of scents, the simple and natural seem
to me the most pleasing, and I have often observed that they cause an
alteration in me, and work upon my spirits according to their several
virtues. In excessive heats I always travel by night, from sunset to
sunrise. I am betimes sensible of the little breezes that begin to
sing and whistle in the shrouds, the forerunners of the storm.--When
I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts are for a while
taken up with foreign occurrences, I some part of the time call them
back again to my walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of the
solitude, and to myself.--There is nothing in us either purely
corporeal, or purely spiritual. 'Tis an inhuman wisdom that would
have us despise and hate the culture of the body. 'Tis not a soul,
'tis not a body, we are training up, but a man; and we ought not to
divide him. Of all the infirmities we have, the most savage is to
despise our being."
For, the scene of events being now contracted very closely to Paris,
the predestined actors therein were gradually drawn thither as into
some narrow battlefield or slaughter-house or fell trap of destiny,
and Gaston, all unconsciously, along with them--he and his private
fortunes involved in those larger ones. Result of chance, or fate,
or cunning prevision, there are in the acts great and little--the
acts and the words alike--of the king and his associates, at this
moment, coincidences which give them at least superficially the
colour of an elaborate conspiracy. [118] Certainly, as men looked
back afterwards, all the seemingly random doings of those restless
months ending in the Noces Vermeilles marriage of Henry of Navarre
with Margaret of France, lent themselves agreeably to the theory of a
great plot to crush out at one blow, in the interest of the reigning
Valois, not the Huguenots only but the rival houses of Guise and
Bourbon. The word, the act, from hour to hour through what presented
itself at the time as a long-continued season of frivolity, suggested
in retrospect alike to friend and foe the close connexion of a
mathematical problem. And yet that damning coincidence of date, day
and hour apparently so exactly timed, in the famous letter to the
Governor of Lyons, by which Charles, the trap being now ready, seems
to shut all the doors upon escaping victims, is admitted even by
Huguenot historians to have been fortuitous. Gaston, recalling to
mind the actual mien of Charles as be passed to and fro across the
chimeric scene, timid, and therefore constitutionally trustful
towards older persons, filially kissing the hand of the grim Coligni-
-Mon p�re! Mon p�re!--all his c�lineries in that age of courtesy and
assassinations--would wonder always in time to come, as the more
equitable sort of historians have done, what amount of guilty
foresight the young king had carried in his bosom. And this
ambiguity regarding the nearest agent in so great a crime, adding
itself to the general mystery of life, touched Gaston duly with a
sense [119] of the dim melancholy of man's position in the world. It
might seem the function of some cruel or merely whimsical power,
thus, by the flinging of mere dust through the air, to double our
actual misfortunes. However carefully the critical intelligence in
him might trim the balance, his imagination at all events would never
be clear of the more plausible construction of events. In spite of
efforts not to misjudge, in proportion to the clearness with which he
recalled the visible footsteps of the "accursed" Valois, he saw them,
irresistibly, in connexion with the end actually reached, moving to
the sounds of wedding music, through a world of dainty gestures, amid
sonnets and flowers, and perhaps the most refined art the world has
seen, to their surfeit of blood.
Delirium was in the air already charged with thunder, and laid hold
on Gaston too. It was as if through some unsettlement in the
atmospheric medium the objects around no longer acted upon the senses
with the normal result. Looking back afterwards, this singularly
self-possessed person had to confess that under its influence he had
lost for a while the exacter view of certain outlines, certain real
differences and oppositions of things in that hotly coloured world of
Paris (like a shaken tapestry about him) awaiting the Eve of Saint
Bartholomew. Was the "undulant" philosophy of Monsieur de Montaigne,
in collusion with this dislocating time, at work upon him, that,
following with only too entire a mobility the experience of the hour,
he found himself more than he could have thought possible the toy of
external accident? Lodged in Abelard's quarter, he all but repeats
Abelard's typical experience. His new Heloise, with capacities
doubtless, as he reflected afterwards regretfully, for a refined and
serious happiness, although actually so far only a man's plaything,
sat daintily amid her posies and painted potteries in the [125]
window of a house itself as forbidding and stern as her kinsmen, busy
Huguenot printers, well-to-do at a time not only fertile in new books
and new editions, but profuse of tracts, sheets, satiric handbills
for posting all over France. Gaston's curiosity, a kind of
fascination he finds in their dark ways, takes him among them on
occasion, to feel all the more keenly the contrast of that picture-
like prettiness in this framing of their grim company, their grim
abode. Her frivolity is redeemed by a sensitive affection for these
people who protect her, by a self-accusing respect for their
religion, for the somewhat surly goodness, the hard and unattractive
pieties into which she cannot really enter; and she yearns after her
like, for those harmless forbidden graces towards which she has a
natural aptitude, loses her heart to Gaston as he goes to and fro,
wastes her days in reminiscence of that bright passage, notes the
very fineness of his linen. To him, in turn, she seems, as all
longing creatures ever have done, to have some claim upon him--a
right to consideration--to an effort on his part: he finds a sister
to encourage: she touches him, clings where she touches. The gloomy,
honest, uncompromising Huguenot brothers interfere just in time to
save her from the consequence of what to another than Gaston might
have counted as only a passing fondness to be soon forgotten; and the
marriage almost forced upon him seemed under its actual conditions no
binding sacrament. [126] A marriage really indissoluble in itself,
and for the heart of Colombe sacramental, as he came afterwards to
understand--for his own conscience at the moment, the transaction
seemed to have but the transitoriness, as also the guilt of a vagrant
love. A connexion so light of motive, so inexpressive of what seemed
the leading forces of his character, he might, but for the sorrow
which stained its actual issue, have regarded finally as a mere
mistake, or an unmeaning accident in his career.
Coligni lay suffering in the fiery August from the shot of the
ambiguous assassin which had missed his heart, amid the real or
feigned regrets of the Guises, of the royal family, of his true
friends, wondering as they watched whether the bullet had been a
poisoned one. The other Huguenot leaders had had their warnings to
go home, as the princes of the house of Navarre, Cond� and Henry of
Bearn, would fain have done--the gallant world about them being come
just now to have certain suspicious resemblances to a prison or a
trap. Under order of the king the various quarters of Paris had been
distributed for some unrevealed purpose of offence or defence. To
the officers in immediate charge it was intimated that "those of the
new religion" designed "to rise against the king's authority, to the
trouble of his subjects and the city of Paris. For the prevention of
which conspiracy the king enjoined the Provost to possess himself
[127] of the keys of the various city gates, and seize all boats
plying on the river, to the end that none might enter or depart."
And just before the lists close around the doomed, Gaston has bounded
away on his road homeward to the bed of the dying grandfather, after
embracing his wife, anxious, if she might, to share his journey, with
some forecast of coming evil among those dark people.
The wild news of public disaster, penetrating along the country roads
now bristling afresh with signs of universal war, seemed of little
consequence in comparison with that closer grief at home, which made
just then the more effective demand on his sympathy, till the thought
came of the position of Colombe--his wife left behind there in Paris.
Immediate rumour, like subsequent history, gave variously the number-
-the number of thousands--who perished. The great Huguenot leader
was dead, one party at least, the royal party, safe for the moment
and in high spirits. As Charles himself put it, the ancient private
quarrel between the houses of Guise and Chatillon was ended by the
decease of the chief of the latter, Coligni de Ch�tillon--a death so
saintly after its new fashion that the long-delayed vengeance of
Henri de Guise on the presumed instigator of the murder of his father
seemed a martyrdom. And around that central barbarity the slaughter
had spread over Paris in widening [129] circles. With conflicting
thoughts, in wild terror and grief, Gaston seeks the footsteps of
Colombe, of her people, from their rifled and deserted house to the
abodes of their various acquaintance, like the traces of wrecked men
under deep water. Yet even amid his private distress, queries on
points of more general interest in the event would not be excluded.
With whom precisely, in whose interest had the first guilty motion
been?--Gaston on the morrow asked in vain as the historian asks
still. And more and more as he picked his way among the direful
records of the late massacre, not the cruelty only but the obscurity,
the accidental character, yet, alas! also the treachery, of the
public event seemed to identify themselves tragically with his own
personal action. Those queries, those surmises were blent with the
enigmatic sense of his own helplessness amid the obscure forces
around him, which would fain compromise the indifferent, and had made
him so far an accomplice in their unfriendly action that he felt
certainly not quite guiltless, thinking of his own irresponsible,
self-centered, passage along the ways, through the weeks that had
ended in the public crime and his own private sorrow. Pity for those
unknown or half-known neighbours whose faces he must often have
looked on--ces pauvres morts!--took an almost remorseful character
from his grief for the delicate creature whose vain longings had been
perhaps but a rudimentary aptitude for the [130] really high things
himself had represented to her fancy, the refined happiness to which
he might have helped her. The being whose one claim had lain in her
incorrigible lightness, came to seem representative of the suffering
of the whole world in its plenitude of piteous detail, in those
unvalued caresses, that desire towards himself, that patient half-
expressed claim not to be wholly despised, poignant now for ever.
For he failed to find her: and her brothers being presumably dead,
all he could discover of a certainty from the last survivor of her
more distant kinsmen was the fact of her flight into the country,
already in labour it was thought, and in the belief that she had been
treacherously deserted, like many another at that great crisis. In
the one place in the neighbourhood of Paris with which his knowledge
connected her he seeks further tidings, but hears only of her passing
through it, as of a passage into vague infinite space; a little
onward, dimly of her death, with the most damaging view of his own
conduct presented with all the condemnatory resources of Huguenot
tongues, but neither of the place nor the circumstances of that
event, nor whether, as seemed hardly probable, the child survived.
It was not till many years afterwards that he stood by her grave,
still with no softening of the cruel picture driven then as with fire
into his soul; her affection, her confidence in him still contending
with the suspicions, the ill-concealed [131] antipathy to him of her
hostile brothers, the distress of her flight, half in dread to find
the husband she was pursuing with the wildness of some lost child,
who seeking its parents begins to suspect treacherous abandonment.
That most mortifying view of his actions had doubtless been further
enforced on her by others, the worst possible reading, to her own
final discomfiture, of a not unfaithful heart.
NOTES
Like the shrinking, childish Elisabeth, the Pope also wept at that
dubious service to his Church from one who was, after all, a Huguenot
in belief; and Huguenots themselves pitied his end.--"Ah! ces
pauvres morts! que j'ai eu un meschant conseil! Ah! ma nourrice! ma
mie, ma nourrice! que de sang, et que de meurtres!"
Bruno himself tells us, long after he had withdrawn himself from it,
that the monastic life promotes the freedom of the intellect by its
silence and self-concentration. The prospect of such freedom
sufficiently explains why a young man who, however well-found in
worldly and personal advantages, was above all conscious of great
intellectual possessions, and of fastidious spirit also, with a
remarkable distaste for the vulgar, should have espoused poverty,
chastity, and obedience, in a Dominican cloister. What liberty of
mind may really come to, in such places, what daring new departures
it may suggest even to the strictly monastic temper, is exemplified
by the dubious and dangerous mysticism of men like John of Parma and
[140] Joachim of Flora, the reputed author of a new "Everlasting
Gospel"; strange dreamers, in a world of sanctified rhetoric, of that
later dispensation of the Spirit, in which all law will have passed
away; or again by a recognised tendency, in the great rival Order of
Saint Francis, in the so-called "spiritual" Franciscans, to
understand the dogmatic words of faith, with a difference.
The Dominican brother was at no distant day to break far enough away
from the election, the seeming "vocation," of his youth, yet would
remain always, and under all circumstances, unmistakably a monk in
some predominant qualities of temper. At first it was only by way of
thought that he asserted his liberty--delightful, late-found,
privilege!--traversing, in strictly mental journeys, that spacious
circuit, as it broke away before him at every moment upon ever-new
horizons. Kindling thought and imagination at once, the prospect
draws from him cries of joy, of a kind of religious joy, as in some
new "canticle of the creatures," some new hymnal, or antiphonary.
"Nature" becomes for him a sacred term.--"Conform thyself to Nature!
"with what sincerity, what enthusiasm, what religious fervour, he
enounces that precept, to others, to himself! Recovering, as he
fancies, a certain primeval sense of Deity broadcast on things, a
sense in which Pythagoras and other "inspired" theorists of early
Greece had abounded, in his hands philosophy becomes a poem, a [145]
sacred poem, as it had been with them. That Bruno himself, in "the
enthusiasm of the idea," drew from his axiom of the "indifference of
contraries" the practical consequence which is in very deed latent
there, that he was ready to sacrifice to the antinomianism, which is
certainly a part of its rigid logic, the austerities, the purity of
his own youth, for instance, there is no proof. The service, the
sacrifice, he is ready to bring to the great light that has dawned
for him, occupying his entire conscience with the sense of his
responsibilities to it, is the sacrifice of days and nights spent in
eager study, of plenary, disinterested utterance of the thoughts that
arise in him, at any hazard, at the price, say! of martyrdom. The
work of the divine Spirit, as he conceives it, exalts, inebriates
him, till the scientific apprehension seems to take the place of
prayer, oblation, communion. It would be a mistake, he holds, to
attribute to the human soul capacities merely passive or receptive.
She, too, possesses initiatory power as truly as the divine soul of
the world, to which she responds with the free gift of a light and
heat that seem her own.
That the stars are suns: that the earth is in motion: that the earth
is of like stuff with the stars:--now the familiar knowledge of
children--dawning on Bruno as calm assurance of reason on appeal from
the prejudice of the eye, brought to him an inexpressibly
exhilarating sense of enlargement in the intellectual, nay! the
physical atmosphere. And his consciousness of unfailing unity and
order did not desert him in that broader survey, which made the
utmost one could ever know of the earth seem but a very little
chapter in the endless history of God the Spirit, rejoicing so
greatly in the admirable spectacle that it never ceases to evolve
from matter new conditions. The immoveable earth, as we term it,
beneath one's feet!--Why, one almost felt the movement, the
respiration, of God in it. And yet how greatly even the physical
eye, the sensible imagination (so to term it) was flattered by the
theorem. What joy in that motion, in the prospect, the music! "The
music of the spheres!"--he could listen to it in a perfection such as
had never been conceded to Plato, to Pythagoras even.--
Yes! The grand old Christian hymns, perhaps [152] the grandest of
them all, seemed to lend themselves in the chorus, to be deepened
immeasurably under this new intention. It is not always, or often,
that men's abstract ideas penetrate the temperament, touch the animal
spirits, affect conduct. It was what they did with Bruno. The
ghastly spectacle of the endless material universe--infinite dust, in
truth, starry as it may look to our terrestrial eyes--that prospect
from which the mind of Pascal recoiled so painfully, induced in Bruno
only the delightful consciousness of an ever-widening kinship and
sympathy, since every one of those infinite worlds must have its
sympathetic inhabitants. Scruples of conscience, if he felt such,
might well be pushed aside for the "excellency" of such knowledge as
this. To shut the eyes, whether of the body or the mind, would be a
kind of sullen ingratitude;--the one sin to believe, directly or
indirectly, in any absolutely dead matter anywhere, as being
implicitly a denial of the indwelling spirit.--A free spirit,
certainly, as of old! Through all his pantheistic flights, from
horizon to horizon, it was still the thought of liberty that
presented itself, to the infinite relish of this "prodigal son" of
Dominic. God the Spirit had made all things indifferently, with a
largeness, a beneficence, impiously belied by any theory of
restrictions, distinctions, of absolute limitation. Touch! see!
listen! eat freely of all the trees of the garden of Paradise, with
the voice of the [153] Lord God literally everywhere!--here was the
final counsel of perfection. The world was even larger than youthful
appetite, youthful capacity. Let theologian and every other theorist
beware how he narrowed either. "The plurality of worlds!"--How petty
in comparison seemed those sins, the purging of which was men's chief
motive in coming to places like this convent, whence Bruno, with vows
broken, or for him obsolete, presently departed. A sonnet,
expressive of the joy with which he returned to so much more than the
liberty of ordinary men, does not suggest that he was driven from it.
Though he must have seemed to those who surely had loved so loveable
a creature there to be departing, like the "prodigal" of the Gospel,
into the farthest of possible far countries, there is no proof of
harsh treatment on their part, or even of an effort to detain him.
It happens most naturally of course that those who undergo the shock
of spiritual or intellectual change sometimes fail to recognise their
debt to the deserted cause:--How much of the heroism, or other high
quality, of their rejection has really been the product of what they
reject? Bruno, the escaped monk, is still a monk; and his
philosophy, impious as it might seem to some, a religion; very new
indeed, yet a religion. He came forth well-fitted by conventual
influences to play upon men as he had been played upon. A challenge,
a war-cry, an [154] alarum, everywhere he seemed to be but the
instrument of some subtly materialised spiritual force, like that of
the old Greek prophets, that "enthusiasm" he was inclined to set so
high, or like impulsive Pentecostal fire. His hunger to know, fed
dreamily enough at first within the convent walls, as he wandered
over space and time, an indefatigable reader of books, would be fed
physically now by ear and eye, by large matter-of-fact experience, as
he journeys from university to university; less as a teacher than a
courtier, a citizen of the world, a knight-errant of intellectual
light. The philosophic need to try all things had given reasonable
justification to the stirring desire for travel common to youth, in
which, if in nothing else, that whole age of the later Renaissance
was invincibly young. The theoretic recognition of that mobile
spirit of the world, ever renewing its youth, became the motive of a
life as mobile, as ardent, as itself, of a continual journey, the
venture and stimulus of which would be the occasion of ever-new
discoveries, of renewed conviction.
The unity, the spiritual unity, of the world:--that must involve the
alliance, the congruity, of all things with one another, of the
teacher's personality with the doctrine he had to deliver, of the
spirit of that doctrine with the fashion of his utterance, great
reinforcements of sympathy. In his own case, certainly, when Bruno
confronted his audience at Paris, himself, his theme, [155] his
language, were alike the fuel of one clear spiritual flame, which
soon had hold of his audience also; alien, strangely alien, as that
audience might seem from the speaker. It was intimate discourse, in
magnetic touch with every one present, with his special point of
impressibility; the sort of speech which, consolidated into literary
form as a book, would be a dialogue according to the true Attic
genius, full of those diversions, passing irritations, unlooked-for
appeals, in which a solicitous missionary finds his largest range of
opportunity, and takes even dull wits unaware. In Bruno, that
abstract theory of the perpetual motion of the world was become a
visible person talking with you.
Like nature, like nature in that opulent country of his birth which
the "Nolan," as he delighted to call himself, loved so well that,
born wanderer as he was, he must perforce return thither sooner or
later at the risk of life, he gave plenis manibus, but without
selection, and was hardly more fastidious in speech than the
"asinine" vulgar he so deeply contemned. His rank, un-weeded
eloquence, abounding in play of words, rabbinic allegories, verses
defiant of prosody, in the kind of erudition he professed to despise,
with here and there a shameless image,--the product not of formal
method, but of Neapolitan improvisation--was akin to the heady wine,
the sweet, coarse odours, of that fiery, volcanic soil, fertile in
such irregularities as manifest power. Helping himself indifferently
to all religions for rhetoric illustration, his preference was still
for that of the soil, the old pagan religion, and for the primitive
Italian gods, whose names and legends haunt his speech, as they do
the carved and pictorial work of that age of the Renaissance. To
excite, to surprise, to move men's minds, like the volcanic earth as
if in travail, and, according to the Socratic fancy, [157] to bring
them to the birth, was after all the proper function of the teacher,
however unusual it might seem in so ancient a university.
"Fantastic!"--from first to last, that was the descriptive epithet;
and the very word, carrying us to Shakespeare, reminds one how
characteristic of the age such habit was, and that it was pre-
eminently due to Italy. A man of books, he had yet so vivid a hold
on people and things, that the traits and tricks of the audience
seemed to strike from his memory all the graphic resources of his old
readings. He seemed to promise some greater matter than was then
actually exposed by him; to be himself enjoying the fulness of a
great outlook, the vague suggestion of which did but sustain the
curiosity of the listeners. And still, in hearing him speak you
seemed to see that subtle spiritual fire to which he testified
kindling from word to word. What Gaston then heard was, in truth,
the first fervid expression of all those contending views out of
which his written works would afterwards be compacted, of course with
much loss of heat in the process. Satyric or hybrid growths, things
due to hybris,+ insult, insolence, to what the old satyrs of fable
embodied,--the volcanic South is kindly prolific of these, and Bruno
abounded in mockery; though it was by way of protest. So much of a
Platonist, for Plato's genial humour he had nevertheless substituted
the harsh laughter of Aristophanes. Paris, teeming, beneath a [158]
very courtly exterior, with mordant words, in unabashed criticism of
all real or suspected evil, provoked his utmost powers of scorn for
the "Triumphant Beast," the "installation of the ass," shining even
there amid the university folk,--those intellectual bankrupts of the
Latin Quarter, who had so long passed between them, however gravely,
a worthless "parchment and paper" currency. In truth, Aristotle, the
supplanter of Plato, was still in possession, pretending, as Bruno
conceived, to determine heaven and earth by precedent, hiding the
proper nature of things from the eyes of men. "Habit"--the last word
of his practical philosophy--indolent habit! what would this mean, in
the intellectual life, but just that sort of dead judgments which,
because the mind, the eye, were no longer really at work in them, are
most opposed to the essential quickness and freedom of the spirit?
NOTES:
132. +From Aus der Harzreise, "Bergidylle 2": "Tannenbaum, mit gr�nen
Fingern," Stanza 10. E-text editor's translation: "Now that I have
grown to maturity, / Have read and traveled much, / My whole heart
expands / With my belief in the Holy Spirit."
THE END